Investment Biker Page 27

  Finally he threw me in jail, which meant he stuck me in one of the bare rooms in his house. True, I could’ve crawled out the window, but a soldier was standing in the yard and I wouldn’t have gotten far.

  I paced about and seethed.

  Finally, I gave in again.

  I agreed to pay Rayon a few hundred dollars only if he ensured that we could leave Ilebo. We could leave, he said, but only by train, as the roads south were closed. Not only had I arrived at a state of not believing anything he said, but his shifty expression told me he had some ulterior motive, one I couldn’t read. Part of the deal, however, was that we had to eat dinner that night at his house.

  We loathed the man, but this wasn’t an invitation we could refuse. I saw his game plan, and it wasn’t going to work. He wanted us to feel good toward him so we wouldn’t rat on his conduct once we reached Lubumbashi. Fat chance.

  That night his wife, his kids, everybody was there. Like all African men, he used his wife as a servant and then ignored her. Tabitha, being a Western woman, could sit and eat with Rayon and me, but his wife had to wait on us.

  Afterward he said, “Now we all have to go out and have a beer together. We have to be friends and make up, so that everybody has good feelings about all this.”

  Again it wasn’t politic to decline, so we went to the disco. The captain joined us. At the table they started hitting on us for more money.

  I blew up. “Now, wait a minute! You told me I don’t have to pay any more. I’m not going to pay any more, and that’s that.”

  They giggled and pointed at me, smiled, and said, “Okay, no more money.”

  While we were drinking, I said, “Since we’re all happy together and friends, let me take some pictures, give them to you so you’ll have something to remember this.” They might not give me their names, but with pictures I could identify them.

  I took a dozen Polaroids and with great fanfare handed them around, managing to palm two with shots of Rayon and the captain. I pictured myself at the interior ministry in Lubumbashi saying, “Okay, here are the bastards who did it. Let’s put them in jail, have an international incident and all the rest of it.”

  So, nine days after our detention, we were escorted down to the train yard by the captain, Rayon, and a raggedy troop of local constabulary.

  As for why they insisted we leave by rail, I gathered that now that we had been plucked clean, they wanted to make sure the indignant geese were shot off by the iron horse as far as they could be sent. It’s the only time I’ve ever been run out of town on a rail.

  We bumped and rattled our way south on a flatcar through a long stretch of lush jungle.

  The good news was that Pierre, El Capitan, and Rayon were behind us; the bad news was that this creaking, swaying train was obviously going to take a lot longer than the two days promised by the stationmaster. Both of us were full of relief to be away from Ilebo, but we were also acutely aware that if for any reason the train masters tossed us off this flatcar, we’d wind up smack in the middle of one of the densest, most dangerous jungles on the planet.

  We learned that every railroad car in the world has its own brakes. We also learned that for safety reasons, only one car with broken brakes could be attached on each train. Naturally, our flatcar didn’t have brakes, nor did another which carried a half-dozen self-important Zairian soldiers and a Mercedes-Benz. I figured they had stolen a car for a general and were taking it to him, or perhaps transporting it for repairs.

  With its roads washed away by the continual rains, the lifeblood of Zaire were these trains and its river barges, which transported copper and diamonds. Without them everything in the country would die.

  Everything was chaotic in Zaire, and rail service was no exception. Not only were there lots of stops and hours of waiting, but in the major stations every car was uncoupled and a new train was made up. Some stretches of the railroad used diesel locomotives, and some used electric. To compound the confusion, there was rarely any fuel.

  So, as our flatcar traveled from station to station, we kept getting bumped by the soldiers and that damn Mercedes-Benz. At every station their flatcar would be the one car attached to the next train, ours the one forced to wait. I repeatedly asked the rail officials to give us another car, one with brakes, but out here in the jungle there was no depot platform on which to unload and reload our heavy motorcycles.

  In every town the police found us and asked for our papers. Luckily for us, Africa had chiefly been colonized by the French and the English, so language was no problem. Back in Russia and China, English was still the second language of choice, although Japanese is rapidly supplanting English in China. Indeed, nearly half the people in the world speak some measure of English, and up to here we got by virtually everywhere with English, Tabitha’s French, a smattering of local words, and sign language. I was worried that these local cops would pull the same stunt as the captain and Rayon had, but they didn’t.

  It was astonishing to realize that the Siberians were more efficient than the Zairians. In Siberia we had also traveled about six hundred miles by flatcar. But there it had taken us two-and-a-half days; in Zaire, nine.

  The long waits gave us time to explore the villages, towns, and cities along the tracks. We stopped for hours in Kananga, a major city. Near the tracks were hundreds of old rails, ripped up and thrown to the side along with thousands of crossties.

  The waste was staggering. Here in a country short of good steel, rails lay rusting. I supposed a clever foreigner could simply come through here, sprinkle around a little largesse, pick up this stuff, and make a fortune.

  Why hadn’t the locals melted it down into something useful? Because this was Zaire, because nobody here was organized enough.

  We walked through Kananga, which had once been a bustling, thriving city. Now the old Belgian colonial buildings were dilapidated, sagging with decades of neglect, and shuttered.

  “Look,” I said, “that used to be the post office.”

  “There, that used to be a hotel,” Tabitha said.

  “That used to be a fancy restaurant.”

  “That was a tailor shop.”

  “A school.”

  “The city hall.”

  “A warehouse.”

  The train station had been built fifty to a hundred years before and hadn’t been painted in decades, probably not since the Belgians had left. Most of its rooms—the old waiting room, the men’s room, the ladies’ room, the restaurant—were closed off and locked. A couple of offices were open, one of which was the train master’s. As usual, it was spare, a small bare room with a desk, a lamp, and a decades-old telephone that only sometimes worked.

  An almost new four-wheel-drive Land Rover passed us.

  “My God,” I said, “where did that come from?”

  On its door was painted the answer: DONATED BY THE BAPTIST CHURCH OF JACKSON. A fat, well-dressed African was behind the wheel, obviously the king of the local economy, the baron of these parts, driving a vehicle that the Jackson Baptists back in the States had given him. He certainly didn’t give the impression that he was on churchly business; he seemed to be using the vehicle to consolidate more earthly arrangements.

  On our way out of Kananga we passed the defunct Dodge-Plymouth dealership, which looked to have once been large. There was the garage, on the wall were fading posters of sixties cars, and over there the showroom, but now the glass was broken and the front boarded up. In my hometown of Demopolis, Alabama, the Dodge-Plymouth dealership had closed thirty years before. From the similar style of these ancient posters and the out-of-date logo, I guessed this dealership had been abandoned at about the same time.

  We explored many towns like Kananga, all of which saddened us. Water towers rusted and falling down. Two- and three-story buildings on either side of once prosperous main streets, in ruins now, boarded up, crumbling. An entire people had spent money, energy, and the capital of their souls erecting and maintaining these now-collapsing structures. Not onl
y was city after city in ruins, but also the farms, plantations, and ranch houses we passed; vast amounts of capital and energy and lives tossed away by the careless Zairians.

  The train stopped again. To pass the time, we went to the marketplace, where we found grasshoppers and locusts on sale. Tabitha turned up her nose, but I bought and ate some locusts, finding them tasty, crunchy and sweet.

  One entrepreneur in a corner of a vast, nearly empty store displayed an extraordinary collection of secondhand T-shirts, three hundred or so. They were printed with Western designs, everything from the stuffy Yale Divinity School logo to funky pictures of the Grateful Dead.

  Although his shirts were used, he had a well-stocked display, a selection that would have done proud any college shop in America.

  This I understood: Here was a guy who realized his specialty was T-shirts, and he was in the marketplace working hard at his trade.

  Where had he gotten these shirts? In another corner of this store were boxes of used clothes for sale, each carton marked with the names of various American churches that had donated them.

  “Do you think the people who donated those meant for them to be sold?” Tabitha asked. She was still a card-carrying liberal from Manhattan’s Upper West Side, but the card was becoming tattered.

  “I somehow doubt it,” I said.

  No country in the world is wetter than Zaire. If you need water, all you have to do is put a bucket outside for a day. Yet we came across one Peace Corps volunteer whose job was to dig wells. True, the wells fell in within a year or two from neglect, as the Zairians didn’t need or maintain them, but his job was to sink them, and sink them he did.

  “I wonder if I can ever vote for foreign aid again,” Tabitha said. “We haven’t seen one good use it’s been put to on this whole trip.”

  In fact, foreign aid’s chief by-product is to prop up bad regimes. What foreign aid teaches dictators and the political hangers-on around them is how to obtain foreign aid, not how to make their countries productive. What foreign aid teaches a country’s best and brightest businessmen is how to suck up to the politicians who administer it, not how to build businesses that earn hard currencies. In a country suffused with foreign aid, the military doesn’t learn how to defend the state from external enemies, but how to protect its dictatorial masters from internal dissent. Foreign aid drives Western state-department types, International Monetary Fund bankers, academics, and UN bureaucrats to concoct endless studies on how aid should be spent, studies which few of the official brigands who receive the aid bother to read.

  What we need to teach developing countries is how to open their markets, how to make their businesses competitive with those in other countries. How can a country become prosperous without prosperous businesses? Have there ever been prosperous businesses without entrepreneurs having the guts to risk their capital, time, and energy to increase their wealth? Isn’t this so elementary it’s self-evident?

  To take its rightful place in the global marketplace, each country needs to develop its own competitive advantage, its own products that it produces cheaper and better than any other. Foreign aid postpones, even cripples, this development of its businesspeople, leading at best to economic stagnation, at worst to a loss of pride and spirit, which are vital to every successful society.

  Deciding to chance the roads, we left the train one hundred and fifty miles before Lubumbashi. After nine days and five hundred miles of stop-and-go riding, the torpid pace was driving us crazy. We were told there were no gas stations till the city, but I figured we had enough in our tanks to reach it. Besides, surely the trusty black market wouldn’t let us down.

  They were right about there being no gas stations, and I was wrong about the black market. Even when we got to Lubumbashi, even though this was a major city—a gigantic city—at the first gas station there wasn’t any gas. No, the attendant didn’t expect more any time soon.

  “Where can we get gas?” I asked.

  He gave us directions to another station.

  We drove the thirty blocks and said that we didn’t have gas.

  The attendant shrugged and said, “Well, who does?” His station was out, too.

  We pressed him, and he directed us to yet another station.

  Finally, we arrived at the city’s main gas station. They had a little and agreed to sell us twenty liters. Between them, our bikes held sixty. A carton of cigarettes helped us buy thirty liters, fifteen for each bike. Naturally, I tried to get him to sell us more, but he was afraid to, figuring he could go only so far in doing us a favor.

  This was the only gas in Lubumbashi, the south’s major city.

  Gas here wasn’t expensive, simply unavailable, the way it had been cheap and hard to get in Siberia and Russia. But this made sense: Fix a price too low, and no one wants to supply it—not individuals, not corporations, and not governments.

  We went back the next morning and got another ten liters. We drove to the other gas stations, trying to get more gas, but we had no luck.

  We came back to the main station later, precisely at the time the attendant had told me to.

  No gas, he said with his usual shrug.

  Out of frustration I shouted, “What kind of country is this? Why isn’t there any gas?”

  Which meant absolutely nothing to this guy—what kind of country was this? How can you not have any gas? It made as much sense as screaming, “Why don’t you have any kryptonite? What kind of planet is this?”

  A white woman pulled into the station, her small son in the front seat. With a stunned expression she asked, “Qu’est-ce qu’il ya?” (“What’s going on?”)

  The station attendant murmured, “The boss’s wife.”

  She had the look of somebody who wanted to ask, “Have the Martians landed? Have the colonialists returned?”

  Over and over we’d been told that nobody could save Zaire except for the departed colonialists, but they no longer wanted to come back.

  Tabitha and I, a little astonished ourselves, explained our situation. We gave her the whole song and dance, how we were trying to go around the world on motorcycles, and here this station didn’t have any gas. We threw ourselves on her mercy. What did we do now?

  Her name was Eloise, and it turned out that her husband was the regional head of Petro Zaire, a part of the large Belgian oil company that had continued its presence here. He managed the southern triangle for the company, a third of the country.

  At her suggestion, we followed her, and she led us to her home. She and her husband lived behind big walls in a spacious villa.

  There we were given something cool to drink. We met her mother, Madame Toussant, more than seventy years old, who had been born in Zaire. This elderly lady had been trying for five days to get to Kinshasa by air. Nothing special—just passage on a scheduled flight between two of the country’s three major cities, like flying from Chicago to New York in the States.

  Every day Madame Toussant went to the airport, ready to fly, and every day she had to return home because there was no fuel. I was amazed. We were in the house of the fuel czar of the southern triangle, and his wife’s mother not only couldn’t fly to Kinshasa, but because of the lack of telephones and the general muck-up of the economy, she had to trek out to the airport every day to find out whether there was fuel.

  It took hard foreign currency, not zaires, to buy that aviation fuel abroad. Doubtless, the airline had to pay for it in advance. No sensible businessman was going to advance credit to Zaire, particularly not to its state-owned airline.

  Eloise sent a servant around back. He reappeared with a twenty-liter jerry can and topped up our tanks.

  We tried to pay her, but she wouldn’t think of taking money, and invited us for lunch. Her husband wasn’t in town. He was in Kinshasa trying to deal with the lack of fuel, which was a major crisis. There was always a major crisis in Zaire.

  Her family had been here since 1921, she said. We listened to stories of her school years in Belgium, how she’
d often come and gone in those halcyon days. Her father had been an engineer who’d come to put in the railroad. She wistfully recalled how good the roads were all those years ago.

  “Back under Belgian rule,” she said, “each town was responsible for the road that came through its part, and they took care of them. The roads were always paved. Now nobody is responsible for anything, so all the roads have collapsed.”

  Eloise described the rich plantations that used to be here, the lush farms outside of town, how much food the farmers had produced, the plentiful produce in the markets.

  I said that someone should bring in the Chinese to farm, that they would go wild in such fertile conditions.

  “No, they tried that,” she said. “Even the Chinese gave up because the government was so hopeless. No cooperation, no spare-parts, no gasoline—nothing.”

  I was shocked. The Chinese didn’t need a lot, and if they, the most frugal and efficient producers in the world, had given up, it really was hopeless. It meant nobody could work with Mobutu.

  Madame Toussant said that back in the old days there had been three thousand working plantations around Lubumbashi. Today you could count them on your fingers.

  In Lubumbashi we met a middle-aged black businessman, Moise Quela, a former economics professor fluent in English, who had grown up in colonial times.

  “I’ve known both,” he said, “colonial days and these awful times now. Things will only become worse here. We need somebody to come in and organize us, bring in capital and sell our products abroad. We need that, we need the money, we need the discipline, and we need the know-how. Trouble is, even if companies from America, France, and Belgium wanted to come back, their own left wing would raise a hue and cry. The current fashion in political thinking won’t allow its capitalists to set this country right. What we need is to be colonized again, but nobody can or will be bothered anymore.”

  The record bears out Moise’s thesis. Even though both were oil-rich countries, thirty years ago Nigeria on a per capita basis was wealthier than Indonesia. At the same time Ghana was wealthier than Thailand on a per capita basis; both then were agriculture-based economies.